A Great & Sublime Fool

Once upon a time, there was a man honored for his incisive wit and literary talent -- and for his many failures in business. Reporters followed him around like fleas. What he did and said always made for good press. What he wrote (and he wrote about a good many things), was entertaining even at a superficial level.
--"Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish."

--"When you cannot get a compliment in any other way, pay yourself one."

--"Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed."

--"A man should not be without morals...it is better to have bad morals than none at all."

--"There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it."



But it is only when you resist the temptation to stop there and instead, you dig beneath the surface, that you get flashes of insight and clues of understanding.



--"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."

--"There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it."

--"Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know of."

--"The lack of money is the root of all evil."



By his own admission, he was a bad businessman, investing and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventions, machinery and a publishing company. At one point, he made and lost $140,000 within the same year. Yet he was not discouraged. "You see, one of the strong points about my business life was that I never gave up. .... My axiom is -- to succeed in business, avoid my example."



In 1895, the publishing company of which he was a two-thirds owner, had incurred debts of over $200K that it couldn't pay and was forced to declare bankruptcy. He decided to take on the responsibility of paying off 100% of the debts. As he left America to begin an extended world tour of speaking and lecturing engagements to earn money, he tried to explain his decision, saying in part:



"The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the rules of insolvency and start free again for himself; but I am not a business man; and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot compromise for less than a hundred cents on the dollar, and its debts never outlaw."



He didn't achieve his goal, which was to pay back the creditors within 4 years. He paid them back in 3 years--a few months shy of his 63rd birthday. His popularity soared, and praise was heaped on him from both sides of the Atlantic. How did he respond? He praised his creditors.



"They treated me well; they treated me handsomely. .... 'Don't you worry and don't you hurry,' was what they said.... ...You are always very kind in saying things about me, but you have forgotten those creditors. There were the handsomest people I ever knew."



The man known as Mark Twain may have saved his best advice for a dinner speech given to celebrate his 70th birthday:



"...we can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you. I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other people to try that, or for me to recommend it. Very few would succeed: you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can't get them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your box. Morals are an acquirement--like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis--no man is born with them. I wasn't myself; I started poor. I hadn't a single moral."



By all standards, Samuel Clemens was a wealthy man. And in addition, when he died five years later, his estate was valued at close of $1 million.